→ June 5, 2026
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Waddle.

I did not know that a group of penguins is called a waddle until I encountered the small-box board game Waddle, published by Allplay, last year at Gen Con. It’s one of the best games Allplay has produced, playing 2 to 5 but best with at least 3, and is great value at $19. (It’s $24 on amazon for some reason, but $19 direct from Allplay, or $26 for the base game and the three-in-one expansions.)

In Waddle, you’ll place your penguins on the white ice hexes on the modular board adjacent to the blue water hexes, which form fishing ponds of varying sizes. You only score points in two ways in Waddle, which is something of a relief: you score for every waddle of penguins you create, and you score for having the most or sometimes second- or third-most penguins around a pond with at least one fish (scoring icon) on it. So there’s some pattern-building and some classic area control, with very quick turns.

On your turn you either can place one of your penguin tokens, most of which show one penguin but two of which show a pair of penguins, or ‘scout ahead,’ passing your turn to move up in the turn order for the next pond. Once you’ve build the modular board, you find the pond with the white number 1 on it, and players begin placing penguins on open white hexes around it, going in turn order. Play moves to the pond with next number once all hexes around the current one are filled with penguins.

If you would rather jump ahead in turn order for the next pond, you can scout ahead, taking your marble off the current turn order track and moving it to the next track, either at the bottom or behind any players who’ve already scouted ahead. If you are the last player with a marble on the current track, however, you must place penguins on all open white hexes around the current pond before play can continue. (Single penguin tokens are considered unlimited, so you can’t run out.)

There are twenty pond tiles with numbers on them, and play progresses through them in ascending order, although you may skip some because there are no open hexes adjacent to them by the time you get there. Once you’ve finished pond 20, all white spaces should have penguins on them, and you begin the scoring. Your waddle is worth anywhere from 1 point for a single penguin all by its lonesome to 36 points for a waddle of 8 or more penguins; there’s a table on each player aid card, but for the math-inclined among you, the number of points for a waddle of size N is the sum of all integers from 1 through N. Double penguin tokens count as 2 penguins for both scoring methods.

Then you check each pond with yellow points icons and look at all white hexes surrounding the entire pond. The player with the most penguins around it gets the number of points shown on the highest icon in the pond. If there are multiple fish/scoring icons, then the player with the second-most penguins gets the second-highest points total, and so on, until you’ve either scored all of the fish or each player has scored once. All ties are ‘friendly,’ so ties players get the full amount shown.

There are a couple of rules tweaks for playing with two players, but that player count kind of obviates the scout-ahead mechanic, and I don’t think Waddle is nearly as good without at least three. It sings at four or five, though, as there’s a ton of competition and you can often find a move that helps you and blocks someone else, and with turns this quick you can play with five and never get bored. Allplay promises a one-minute teach and that’s about right – I think I described every single rule in this review, and you don’t need all of those details to get started.

I’ve played nine of the games in Allplay’s Small Box Big Game series, with one more on my Shelf of Shame (9 Lives), and I’d put this near the top. It might be second, behind Sail; I think Sequoia is a real sleeper, but I’m one of its bigger fans, I think. I would even put Waddle over Mountain Goats, which is good but I think has a limited ceiling. It’s a keeper for me, and the best game Allplay put out in 2025.

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→ June 4, 2026
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Mood Machine.

Music journalist Liz Pelly has spent most of her professional life working and living in indie music circles, which gives her a distinct and important perspective on the consolidation of the music industry around just a few streaming services, with Spotify foremost among them. In her book Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist, she explores the birth of Spotify, how it took over the streaming space, and how pernicious its effects have been on indie musicians and labels – as well as listeners who want to hear anything but the most anodyne music available.

Spotify began as an idea to sell ads, not as a way to save the music industry, or even just as a way for its founders, including the military-minded Daniel Ek, to get rich while working in music. Songs were just a vehicle for selling ads and collecting user data to do so more effectively. Ek and other Spotify execs have retconned their history to make Spotify out to be some kind of savior for music and musicians, even as their practices have proven predatory, including bringing back payola, and they’ve cracked down harder on musicians with tiny followings than they have on scammers posting fake music tracks and clips to try to deke Spotify’s algorithms and rack up streams from listeners who aren’t paying much attention to what’s playing.

Pelly spoke to over a hundred current and former Spotify employees, got access to internal Slack logs, and interviewed musicians, label executives, and others to research Mood Machine, and two consistent themes emerged (among many smaller topics). One is that Spotify’s entire structure, built largely around algorithmic playlists, which are made by machine-learning systems and are distinct from curated ones, assembled by humans, like the ones I post every month, is both corrupt and tends to funnel listeners to a small number of artists from major labels, while paying artists from outside of the big 3 labels a pittance (and paying no artists anything close to fair value). The second is that a huge portion of Spotify’s audience isn’t actually listening to the music: One of their main goals is to get listeners to stick on a playlist as some sort of background noise – similar to Netlix’s “second-screen” nonsense – and let it play for hours and hours, and if it runs out let Spotify’s algorithm just keep playing more songs, so they can serve more ads. Playing a song costs Spotify less than half a penny in royalties. Their dream scenario is The Lost Weekend except with some algorithmic chillwave playlist going in the background for 72 hours.

Harper’s excerpted a portion of Mood Machine in 2024 as a story called “The Ghosts in the Machine.” It exposed Spotify’s program to commission fake tracks from outside vendors under its “Perfect Fit Content” program, where those companies would supply songs by ‘ghost artists’ to pad Spotify’s playlists for deeply discounted royalty rates, allowing Spotify to deliver the same quantity of music to listeners for a lower cost. Spotify execs defended the practice, saying that listeners of those playlists were “half-listening anyway,” so why deliver them real music? Pelly spoke to a number of employees dismayed by the practice, saying it was unethical to deceive listeners and harmful to the music industry they were supposedly supporting. The few editors remaining who curated playlists themselves reported increased pressure to use these ghost artists on their playlists, even though that was antithetical to their mission (and, I would presume, their music fandom). Some of the companies Pelly cites as ghost-artist producers are now getting into AI-generated tracks, such as Epidemic Sound, which also sells royalty-free background music to video producers. It’s the most interesting chapter in a book that’s full of them, and the most overt explanation of why Spotify is harmful to the music industry.

Pelly wraps up with a chapter (not the epilogue) about how listeners can support artists better in the streaming era. The obvious answer – and I’m not criticizing Pelly here – is to buy music. You love an album? Pay for it, whether digitally or physically. Buy it direct from the label or from the artist. Going to shows and buying merch helps as well. Streaming an artist’s music barely makes a dent; you’d have to stream a song around 300 times to get them $1. She points out that while Spotify is generally presumed to have the worst payout rates to artists – no one knows because Spotify’s agreements with major labels are confidential and protected by NDAs, which seems like maybe a restraint of trade, but I’m not a lawyer – the other major streaming sites, like Apple and Amazon, aren’t that much better. I don’t believe she ever said not to stream music, but her message is more like “stream responsibly, and buy liberally.”

The book is so thoroughly researched, with citations as well as quotes from relevant sources, that it can bog down a little in the details, but I will gladly accept that tradeoff to get such an academic take on a popular topic. It is easy to find reasons to hate streaming and find people to tell you they hate streaming. It is a much harder task to explain just why streaming is bad for music, and culture, and explain why it’s also going to be hard to fix the problems streaming, and Spotify in particular, has created. Mood Machine does all of this, without once allowing you to forget that the reason you downloaded Spotify in the first place was because you, in fact, like music.

Next up: Susan Choi’s Flashlight. Dun dun, dun dun dun.

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→ June 1, 2026
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Sorrowland.

Rivers Solomon’s debut novel An Unkindess of Ghosts was a marvel of ingenious plotting and superb character development, using its generation ship as a setting without excessive focus on its mechanics, instead exploring racial caste systems through the literal stratification of its residents across higher and lower decks by skin tones. Their second novel, Sorrowland, shifts its setting to a modern-day gothic milieu, following a queer Black woman who escapes from a Christian cult’s compound in California, only to find the real world inscrutable and inhospitable to her and her two infant children.

Vern Riley was raised at in the Blessed Gardens of Cain, which began as a sort of Black autonomy movement but morphed, as cults often do, into something more insidious when one man took control of the group and converted it into a cult of personality, complete with control regimens and isolation from the outside world. Vern was even forced to marry that first leader’s son, Reverend Sherman, who took over when his father died and continues to suppress the group’s members, including strapping all cult members down while they sleep. She flees one day while pregnant, giving birth to twins in the woods near the compound, beginning a flight that will take her across multiple states, exposing her to a civilization she barely knows or understands, before her eventual return to try to liberate those still in Sherman’s grip – including her mother and brother – and the exposure of the malevolent forces propping up the entire endeavor.

There is a lot going on in Sorrowland, to put it mildly, from the obvious exploration of racism and racial stratification in American society, as well as religion’s role as a tool of oppression, to allusions to the Black power movement and to government efforts to fight it like COINTELPRO. The Blessed Gardens of Cain may be a Black cult, but there are parallels to the Branch Davidians, Heaven’s Gate, and the Aggressive Christianity Missions Training Corps, the last of which received significant press attention when two women who escaped told their stories in a new book. (The temporal precedence is backwards, but the cult Solomon envisioned sounds a hell of a lot like the ACMTC.)

The book could easily have been weighed down by all of its meaning and metaphor, but Solomon gives the readers a compelling, complex protagonist in Vern, who pairs extreme innocence in the ways of the outside world (and the people in it) with strong survivalist skills honed in her time in the cult. She’s on the run almost immediately, first from what she believes is a demon chasing her in the woods, and later from enforcers associated with the cult trying to track her down. She does all of this with two infants and later toddlers in tow – the novel skips ahead in time at several points – giving the whole novel an adventure/horror vibe to keep it moving; every time I thought the story would bog down in its seriousness, something would happen to keep the pace moving.

Sorrowland is still a gloomy read – I can’t say the title didn’t warn me – as Vern runs into obstacle after obstacle, seldom of her own making, and even the denouement only provides partial satisfaction, although I’d argue a fully happy ending would have been unrealistic and out of sync with the remainder of the book. Solomon also explains some of the more mysterious events of the plot with a clever detail, the one bit here that takes this novel into the world of science fiction, although again those elements are there in service of a broader point.

I still prefer An Unkindness of Ghosts, as that book’s protagonist Aster Gray was even stronger than Vern and the mystery within that book was even more compelling, although Solomon set a high bar for their next novel to clear. (They also wrote a novella in between the two called The Deep, a collaboration with Daveed Diggs’ rap trio clipping.) That novel also had better pacing, perhaps because it seemed to try to tackle fewer serious themes, with Sorrowland a more ambitious work. This book was one of two winners of the Otherwise Award in 2021, given to sci-fi or fantasy works that explore or expand our understanding of gender; explaining how Sorrowland does so might risk spoiling some of its secrets, but it’s a worthy honoree that also gets into queer themes and how Vern’s journey is even further complicated by her intersectionality. That Solomon could take something this dark and still make it an exciting read is a testament to their talent as storyteller.

Next up: I’m about halfway through Dinaw Mengestu’s How to Read the Air.

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→ May 27, 2026
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Yokohama Duel.

Yokohama is a medium-heavy economic worker placement game that incorporates some engine-building, route-building, and set collection mechanics, along with a board that’s quite a table hog. It’s a great game, but it’s heavy enough that I don’t own it, not even the beautiful new edition brought out by Synapses Games in 2024. (I should note that it’s also the rare game set in Japan that is designed by someone from Japan, Hisashi Hayashi.)

Synapses followed this with a new edition of the two-player game Yokohama Duel, and while I’m in the minority on this, I prefer this two-player version. It strips down the game to the best parts, reducing the complexity, producing a game that plays reasonably quickly but still gives you most of the satisfaction of building something from the original game.

In Yokohama Duel, you’re both merchants in that Japanese city as the opening of the port has led to an economic boom. You’ll collect materials to fulfill orders for yen and trade goods and other rewards, and use the gains to upgrade your power (worker) cards, gain favor at the church, add technology cards, and finish off those trade goods for more points. The game lasts just four rounds, with sixteen total turns per player in the entire game.

Each player starts with the same four power cards, with powers 1 through 4, and will play them to any of the ten action spaces on the board, two of which (new orders and technology) are unlimited while the others are blocked once one worker card is on them. Four of those action spaces get you the game’s resources of silk, tea, fish, and copper. The bank gets you yen. The Chinatown card lets you trade goods for yen and sometimes yen for goods. Customs lets you take trade goods you’ve acquired and flip them over to their finished sides for more victory points at game-end (1 point per unflipped good, 4 per flipped). The church lets you take cards worth victory points and sometimes immediate rewards.

On your turn, you place the lowest-power card still in your hand on an available space and then take the associated action. What you get is a function of the total power of your worker, which is equal to the number on the card, plus any +1 or +2 power cards you play (you can play just one per worker), plus one more for a shop and one more for a trading post if you’ve built either on that site. You then check the little table and take the reward, which can be nothing if you don’t have enough power. You may then build a shop on that site for 1 yen and a trading house for 4-7 yen, as long as you don’t have one of that type already on the site.

You also have free actions available on every turn, which include fulfilling order cards in your hand by paying the resources shown and taking the reward; and collecting and using foreign agent cards. You get a foreign agent when you fulfill your third order card, buy your third tech card, get your second church card, or flip your second trade good. There are only seven foreign agent cards, however, there’s a competitive aspect here as someone will get four and the other three. Foreign agent cards have power 3 and can be played as a bonus worker, giving you a turn within a turn. They can even be modified by a +1 or +2 card, and they can visit a site that’s already occupied by a power card.

When you play with power 5 or more, you can claim a power bonus card, gaining up to three rewards if you play with a total power of 7. It doesn’t make your regular action stronger, but it’s usually worth aiming for once you have some shops out on the board.

Once each player has played all four of their power cards, the round ends. Refresh the technology cards, retrieve all of your workers, and then, if you wish, upgrade one of your four workers by paying the cost in yen. You flip that worker card to the other side, with 1 more power, for the remainder of the game.

After four rounds, with each player getting two rounds as the start player, the game ends and you add up your points. There are eleven ways to get points, including what you get for leftover yen and resources. You get the points from your order cards, church cards, any tech cards that give rewards, shops (1 point each), trading houses (5 points each), flipped goods, and unflipped goods. The player with the most completed orders gets 6 points. The player with the most total production on their tech cards gets 6 points. That’s it.

It’s not Yokohama, especially since it dispenses with that game’s mechanic of needing to trace a path for your workers through the city, which I respect but also found more frustrating than fun. Yet this two-player game keeps the spirit of the original, and has plenty of direct competition between the two players – the sites for power cards, the foreign agents, even the trading posts, which are limited to just one per card. You may not be constantly vying for the same things, but you will run into each other plenty. It’s just not that big of a city. This is also about half the cost of Yokohama and comes in a much smaller box. If, like me, your most common player count is 2, this is the better choice. I also love the new art, which is attractive and also very bright and easy to look at for the 30-40 minutes it’ll take to play a full game.

I’m a big fan – if I were still doing grades, as I did at Paste, this would have been an 8.5. You can get Yokohama Duel on Amazon but right now it’s about $10-12 cheaper on specialty sites, so probably still less even with shipping.

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→ May 18, 2026
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dnup.

dnup is – or will be shortly, as the game comes out in the U.S. on May 29th – the latest game from SCOUT designer Kei Kajino, and once again we have a card-shedding game of two-valued cards, which have a top and bottom value but can’t be flipped once they’re in your hand. It’s not quite as good a game as SCOUT, but it’s a more clever design, and I’ve found it quite addictive because of how much you thought each move requires.

In dnup, the deck has cards valued 1 through 10, with differing values top and bottom and no connection between them. That is, a 7 card could have any second value on the other side. Players will try to play sets of same-valued cards to the table, but must beat the value of any sets of the same size already in play. So if there is a set of 2 cards on the table on your turn, you can only play another set of 2 if the value is higher than that of the cards already out there. If your played set lasts all the way around the table until your turn comes up again, you get to discard it and play something else. If someone else beats your set, however, you must take those cards back into your hand and rotate them so their values flip.

On your turn, you can play any number of cards from your hand to form a set in front of you, as long as it’s a legal play by beating any set of the same quantity already on the table. You can also take a single card from your hand and add it to someone else’s set, as long as you aren’t creating an illegal set: If there’s a set three 7s and a set of two 4s, you can’t add a 4 to the latter because it would create a set of three 4s that doesn’t beat the set of 7s. If someone later beats that set, you don’t get your card back – the set’s ‘owner’ does. Or you can rotate your entire hand at once and play nothing.

This all means that you will often want to play cards to the table with the hope that someone will top them, returning them to your hand rotated so that you can end up with a more powerful set (or two, or three) to play on future turns. Every time you get to play, you have to consider whether you can play a set in the hopes of shedding those cards permanently, or should play something to top someone else (such as to prevent them from going out too soon), or should play cards to try to get them rotated.

The round ends when two players go out: The first player to do so gets two letters, and the second gets one. The game ends when any player has reached all four letters of “dnup,” regardless of how they got there. This means the number of rounds is limited by the player count – I believe a game can only last as many rounds as there are players.

That’s the real genius of this design: Your decision set is limited, but there are enough factors going into each decision that it feels very tense, and you also can only partly plan for each move because the previous player’s decision can change everything, including putting cards back in your hand you didn’t expect to have.

dnup says it plays 2 to 5, but it is clearly better with more; with three players, your odds of having another player beat your card/set are too low, and it reduces that essential conflict that makes this such a fun, clever game. There are rules for two players where each player plays to two ‘zones’, simulating a table of four players, but I haven’t tried it and the variant seems to take much of the fun out of the game. Some games are just meant for more players – SCOUT is one, dnup is another. I’m a huge fan of dnup, in case you couldn’t tell, even though it took me a lot of plays online to grasp some basic strategy and find that balance between shedding cards and setting up my hand.

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→ May 6, 2026
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The Most Secret Memory of Men.

In 1968, a Malian novelist named Yambo Ouologuem saw his first novel, Le devoir de violence, published to great acclaim, including winning the Prix Renaudot, before accusations that he’d plagiarized text from two other novels stained Ouologuem’s reputation and led to his withdrawal from public life. He eventually returned to Mali, publishing two books under a pseudonym and some poetry, before leaving writing entirely, dying in 2017 with his book still out of print in France. (A new edition appeared in 2018, and a new English translation came out in 2023.)

Senegalese writer Mohamed Mbougar Sarr took Ouologuem’s story and spun it into a novel of his own, The Most Secret Memory of Men, in which Diégane, a young Senegalese writer in Paris, learns of an obscure 1938 novel by T.C. Elimane, nicknamed “The Black Rimbaud” before he, too, was mired in a scandal of plagiarism accusations. He refused to address the claims and disappeared from public life entirely, while the novel, scarcely seen for decades, created a cult-like following in all who read it, with some readers trying to locate Elimane as he slides silently across the globe in his seclusion. Much as the Entertainment film in Infinite Jest drives everyone who sees it to madness, Elimane’s book, The Labyrinth of Inhumanity, possesses all who read it, driving Diégane to learn more about the author, the book’s publication, and the controversy that brought it and its author down.

Ouologuem became the first African author to win the Prix Renaudot, and his defenders have argued that the attacks on his authorship were motivated in large part by racism and nationalism. (In a lovely twist, Sarr won the Prix Goncourt for this book, making him the first African author to win the prize.) Sarr clouds the issue around Elimane’s case; the fictional author’s book did not borrow as much from any single source as Ouologuem appears to have done, but instead patched together lines and phrases from many books, maybe dozens, to create an entirely new work of art, like an album made entirely of samples that ends up sounding nothing like any of the original material. Elimane is, according to his acolytes, using colonialist literature as the building blocks for a post-colonialist novel that might have shaken the world had its white critics not had their way.

Sarr’s novel is itself a giant experiment, as he plays with genres as diverse as noir and the epistolary novel, and the result is a book that feels more out of breath than simply breathless. There is tremendous narrative greed as Diégane searches for Elimane, or anyone who knew him, or anyone else who has read the book. There are also some long monologues, particularly by one of the women who knew Elimane and tells her story in winding paragraphs that may not be reliably narrated. Sarr also includes a tangential subplot that nods to the Arab Spring, where a Senegalese activist lights herself on fire to protest the autocratic regime that rules their country, although its connection to our main story is tenuous. (Senegal did have an election in 2024, with some controversy, but the current leader has still clamped down on civil rights.)

The Most Secret Memory of Men’s greatest strength its anger: Elimane dared to win a prize previously reserved for white French authors, so they tore his novel and ultimately him to pieces. That may explain what happened to Ouologuem; it is also a powerful metaphor for post-colonial Europe, where countries that exploited the people and land of Africa, South America, and much of Asia have paid lip service to their ‘special’ relationships but still engage in racist and nationalist practices most obvious in the so-called migrant crisis. France wasn’t ready for an African writer to put them in their place in 1968; maybe they’re more ready to hear it now.

Next up: I just finished Rivers Solomon’s Sorrowland and started Jo Walton’s Tooth and Claw.

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→ May 5, 2026
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Arkansas eats, 2026 edition.

I did not expect to find stellar sushi and well above-average pizza in northwest Arkansas, but that region contains multitudes. It was my second trip to the reason and I have to say it’s one of my favorite places in the U.S. to visit.

Pizzeria Ruby is an artisan pizza shop with a sign from Fenway Park hanging up over the bar, for some reason. (My server didn’t know why. He also thought it was from New York.) Their pizza style is somewhere between Neapolitan and coal-fired Brooklyn or New Haven styles, crispier than Neapolitan on the outside and the undercarriage, and they use Bianco tomatoes for their red pizzas. I got their version of a margherita, which has more sauce and a few other Italian cheeses in addition to the fresh mozzarella, and would land in my top 30 for sure. I didn’t actually love the sauce, which I think might have been a little too salty, or maybe there was just too much of it relative to the cheese. Their pizzas are huge, 18”, so go with a friend. I also loved their anti-ICE and pro-people signage.

Junto is a sushi restaurant inside the Motto hotel, a boutique hotel in the Hilton chain that seems like an extremely cool place to stay. I know you can get high-quality fish shipped anywhere at this point, but I was still floored to get fish this good in the middle of the country, nowhere near a major airport. The salmon usuzukuri was as tender as I’ve ever had it, and the ponzu sauce paired well with its inherent fatty texture. The miso soup, despite being just miso soup, was also a big hit, mostly because of the dashi – someone’s making that from scratch. The pressed rainbow roll was my server’s suggestion, and it was good for what it was – again, really fresh fish – but probably not ideal for me because those rolls blur all of the different flavors.

Songbird Sandwiches is a food truck located by the 8th Street Market, serving 5-6 gourmet sandwich options along with fancy sodas and kombuchas, because this is actually California, not northwest Arkansas. I got the turkey sandwich which, to their credit, had so much slaw and lettuce and turkey that it probably could have fed me and my wife (had she been there) comfortably. I love their focaccia as well, although focaccia does struggle to hold the fillings when you use it for sandwiches. I’m not complaining one bit about the cost, but I was surprised that it was just over $25 for a sandwich, soda, and 20% tip. Thanks, Donnie!

Hail Fellow Well Met is a restaurant from the owner of Onyx Coffee, which is my favorite coffee roaster in the country and has been for a few years now. HFWM is located next door to Pizzeria Ruby and has a gorgeous space with a ton of natural light and multiple distinct seating areas. It’s counter-service, with a full coffee bar including a pour-over option from Onyx, and I went for brunch on the recommendation of the same person who suggested Junto. I thought I was being boring by getting the “HFWM Simple,” which is just eggs, bacon, potatoes, avocado, and one piece of toast. It is neither boring nor simple: The potatoes are in a rosti/knish sort of combination patty, the eggs are softly scrambled (and served in a cute clay cup), the bacon is thick rashers of pork belly, there’s also a dressed herb salad, the avocado has seeds and spices on it, and also there’s a piece of toast. The only hiccup, if that, was when I asked for hot black tea. You would think I ordered the world’s most obscure cocktail or something, but they did eventually figure it out. I was going to eat there and then go to an Onyx shop to work until my flight, but loved the space so much that I got the same coffee I would have gotten at the café and stayed there the whole morning.

Wright’s BBQ is an Arkansas chain doing Texas-style BBQ, which does mean their signature item is something I don’t eat – brisket. (I gave up eating cow about 7-8 years ago for medical reasons.) Instead I went with a quarter rack of ribs and the smoked chicken, with collards and cole slaw as my sides. The ribs were solid-average, maybe a touch better than that, good flavor, meat that was almost too tender inside, a little toughness around the edges. Probably just average. The chicken was a waste of time – I don’t understand why anyone smokes white meat. It just dries out – dark meat loves slow cooking, white meat needs something fast because it has so little fat. The cole slaw was really vinegary, just right to cut into the sweetness of the rub on the rubs, and clearly fresh because it was so crunchy. The collards were also pretty good, and I appreciate that the pork they used in them was still in large chunks so I could avoid them (just for health, I don’t need to eat what is essentially just more bacon) while still claiming I ate a lot of vegetables.

I stopped by Ozark Mountain Bagel Co. for a quick breakfast one morning, and, well, I got about what I expected. It’s just round bread, and the egg on the egg sandwich was one of those pre-cooked discs.

Finally, Onyx. I’m obsessed, especially with their space in downtown Bentonville, where the line wraps around the bar and out the door for hours on weekend mornings. Their coffee is superb – I’ve probably tried five or six single origins from them and at least two different blends, and I’ve loved all of them. They hit the right roasting level for me, at least, so the tasting notes come through, and with enough coffee to get some good body in the cup. (I’ve been to a few places recently where the flavor was good but the coffee itself felt thin.) Their pour-over menu this weekend included a Rwandan bean that was good enough for me to grab a bag on the way out, after which I walked around the Saturday morning farmer’s market for a while just to take in the atmosphere. If the rest of the state wasn’t somewhere to the right of Gilead, I could easily live there. As for Onyx … it’s still undisputed.

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→ February 20, 2026
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It Was Just An Accident.

Part psychological thriller, part political satire, but entirely human at its core, It Was Just An Accident is the latest film from acclaimed director Jafar Panahi, who has continued to make movies despite decades of conflict with the Iranian dictatorship, which extended to a conviction and prison sentence in absentia just last December. The movie won this year’s Palme d’Or and landed nominations for Best Non-English Language/International Film at the Golden Globes and the Oscars, and, like several of his prior films, was made without the permission of the theocrats in Tehran. (You can rent it on iTunes, Amazon, etc.)

It Was Just An Accident begins with a coincidence: a man is driving home at night on an unlit road with his wife and daughter in the car when he hits an animal, probably a dog, and damages the car. He pulls into the first garage he finds, where a mechanic, Vahid, recognizes the man as his torturer from an Iranian prison. He never saw the man’s face, but knows the squeaking sound of the man’s prosthetic leg. He follows them home, returns the next day, knocks the man out, and kidnaps him, nearly killing him before the man pleads that Vahid is mistaken. Vahid then contacts other former prisoners to see if they can confirm that the man is indeed their captor, Eqbal, also known as Peg Leg, leading to a very darkly comic sequence of events that has six people traveling around in a van, arguing about what to do with the guy who might have destroyed all of their lives.

The plot is secondary to the dialogue and the gamut of emotions it reveals; each of the four former prisoners has a different perspective on how to handle maybe-Eqbal, from the volatile Hamid, who just wants to kill the guy, to the more measured Shiva, who is just as angry as the rest of them but seems to understand that his death won’t solve anything. Instead, the story is the canvas on which Panahi can paint his characters, with enough narrative greed to keep up the pace during the stretches where the characters are just driving around and talking.

For most of its running time, It Was Just An Accident is close to perfect, maintaining an ideal level of tension, including the core mystery of whether the guy is actually Peg Leg, while allowing each of the characters to expostulate with the others enough to give the audience a sense of how the government’s persecution of its enemies has infected all of Iranian society. These four survivors are not visibly wounded; the irony is that the only injured person in the van is the suspected torturer, not his victims. Yet they are all scarred from their experiences in prison, where they were thrown after protesting against economic hardships – another coincidence, as the country is currently engulfed in similar protests, with prices rising and the Iranian rial crashing to record lows. How can they simply go about their lives after the trauma they endured, and now with the added knowledge that the man who tortured them, threatened to kill them, may have even raped one of them, is walking around scot-free?

The movie doesn’t quite stick its landing, unfortunately, as another coincidence of sorts, or at least an unrelated event, crops up that forces the motley crew to make some sort of decision, although it does also allow Panahi to further demonstrate the deep humanity of these people and further contrast them to the regime that would imprison or kill them on the slightest pretense. Once that’s resolved, we get to the climax, with its Shakespearean tone and series of monologues, before a brief final scene that recalls the perfection of the earlier parts of the film.

I’ve only seen three of the Best Picture nominees so far, but I’d put this over Train Dreams and behind Sinners and One Battle After Another. It’s unlikely to win for Best International Feature, as two of its competitors, Sentimental Value and The Secret Agent, scored Best Picture nods, but I wonder if it has a slight chance in its other category, Best Original Screenplay, which seems to be a way to honor a film that’s not going to win anything else, at least about half the time in recent years.

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→ February 18, 2026
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Darwin’s Journey.

Darwin’s Journey is one of the greatest complex board games I’ve ever played – although I’d call it more medium-heavy than heavy – with its incredible balance of various mechanics, strategies, and even a little player interaction. It first came out in 2023 and has since soared into the top 100 overall on BoardGameGeek, a list that skews towards heavier games, while also jumping on to my own top 100 at #16 this November, the highest new entry of any game this time around. I’ve owned the game for probably two years, having picked it up on Prime Day in either 2023 or 2024 for half off, and also love the fact that the box is half the width of any other game of its playing weight I own. (It’s out of stock right now at Miniature Market, but Noble Knight has some used copies.)

Designed by Simone Luciani*, who has three games on my top 100 (Grand Austria Hotel is #17, Tzolk’in is #57), and Nestor Mangone (Masters of Renaissance, last year’s Stupor Mundi), Darwin’s Journey is a worker placement game at heart, asking players to place their four crew members on various action spaces to move their ship, place and move explorers on three mini-maps, gain ‘seals’ to give those crew members more abilities, place stamps for ongoing rewards at the end of each round, deliver specimens to the museum or research ones already there, and more. There are countless opportunities to chain your actions as the game progresses, and you can even add a fifth crew member if you complete a gold-level objective. There are also objectives for each round, plus end-game objectives, with two (one gold and one silver) given to each player at the start, then more available as the game goes along. You also have to make sure you have enough cash on hand, because taking actions nearly always costs at least one coin. There’s a lot going on here, to be sure, although I think the turns are so simple – and your options become more limited within each round as you have fewer workers left to place – that the game play isn’t that complicated.

The rounds are marked by the progress of the HMS Beagle, and that’s one of the few places in this game where the actual history of Darwin’s voyage intersects with the mechanics. (It’s still better at that than the acclaimed In the Footsteps of Darwin, a much inferior game to this one in every way.) You lose points if any round ends with your personal ship behind the Beagle’s position, after which it moves forward to the next marker on its path.

Within a round, each player will place one worker per turn, based in part on the seals (skills) that worker has. You start the game with four workers, one with a wild seal, and then three others with seals you’ll choose in a crew-card draft before the game. The seals represent ship movement (blue), explorer movement (green), stamps (yellow), and more seals (red). When the game begins, there’s one available space for each color of seal, and each of those spaces holds an unlimited number of workers. Once there’s one worker anywhere on the blue/green spaces or the red/yellow spaces, however, placing another one there will cost 2 coins (or 3 in a two-player game). Players can unlock further, more powerful action spaces under each of those four by paying the unlocking cost to place a ‘lens’ on those spaces, making them available to all players – although anyone else has to pay you a coin to use yours. There are six special action spaces that change each game, two of which are available at the start while four are locked. You can also go to the museum to submit or research specimens, go get another objective tile and gain some coins, or go move up in the turn order and gain some coins. If everything’s unlocked, which I don’t think is technically possible, there would be 24 possible action spaces by the end of the game; I think the maximum is actually 22, and I’ve never seen that many in an actual game.

Darwin’s Journey also offers players all sorts of … not quite mini-games, more like side quests that carry real bonuses. You start with 12 stamps in three sets; if you send out all four of a set, you get a bonus. Explorers can place tents on certain spaces on all three maps; you get five of them, and after the first one, each subsequent one you place gets you a bonus. Each crew card you drafted at the beginning has a specific set of five seals shown on it; if you get all five of those seals on one worker’s row, you can assign that card to that worker and get the bonus shown. Getting five seals on a worker also gets you three points at game-end; getting the sixth gets you seven points, and having at least four seals of a certain color gets you an additional benefit when you use that worker for that action. Still with me?

The game goes five rounds, after which you do the end scoring, adding to points you gained during the game from each round’s objective and from points you picked up with your explorers. You score all of your personal objectives. Then you score the research track: every time you submit a specimen, you gain some research points and/or coins, while you can also move up the research track via exploration and occasionally through a special action space. You count the completed rows of specimens in the 4×4 museum, add two, and multiply it by the highest number your marker has passed on the research track; it’s the weirdest part of the scoring by far, but the point gains here can be substantial, easily a quarter or more of your total. I’ve seen winning scores over 200 points, and I have won a game with only about 155 or so.

I’m worried I’m not selling this game enough: It’s fantastic, easily one of the best complex games I’ve ever played, behind only Great Western Trail on my top 100, one spot ahead of Grand Austria Hotel and four spots ahead of Agricola. GWT is a little more accessible, I think, but it has a small deckbuilding element, which is one of my least favorite mechanics. Darwin’s Journey is more forbidding, and getting all of the parts to work together in your head is a real challenge – and even after many plays, I’m still not great at it, because my preferred strategies may not work as well with the specific actions and maps and other facets specific to that game’s board. If you pulled both games out and asked me which one I’d want to play, I’d have a hard time choosing.

* I actually haven’t played Luciani’s highest-rated game, Barrage, which I’ve heard is amazing and quite brutal in its interactive elements. I hated Rats of Wistar – literally got up mid-game at a First Look demo at PAXU and left, although part of that was one of the other players was insufferable – and I would say I like but don’t love Lorenzo il Maginifico, preferring the card-game version. He also co-designed a new version of Railway Boom with Hisashi Hayashi, who won the Spiel des Jahres last year for Bomb Busters and designed the excellent Yokohama games. As always, forza azzurri!

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→ February 11, 2026
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The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (And His Mother).

Raja is a portly gay 63-year-old teacher in Beirut who lives with his overbearing, impossible mother. He calls himself gullible, although I think he’s being overly self-deprecating; he’s surrounded by lunatics, and lived through more history than most of us, from the Lebanese Civil War to the collapse of the country’s economy to the 2020 explosion at the city’s port. Rabih Alameddine’s The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother), winner of the 2025 National Book Award, follows him in a sort of picaresque fashion through his memories of these and other major events in Lebanese history, as he ends up in one ridiculous situation after another, often with the city around him in ruins or chaos. It’s consistently funny, even in its sorrows, with an indelible main character (and his mother) as our tour guide through a sort of absurdist realism, where the improbable takes place right amidst the actual over the course of six decades.

The prompt that opens the novel is that Raja, a philosophy teacher who wrote one book that was reasonably successful, receives an invitation from a foundation in the United States to pay for him to come to their compound and give a lecture. This, he tells us, he accepted, because he is gullible, and it turned out to be a mistake, although we won’t find out what happened until the penultimate chapter of the book. On the way to that story, Raja walks us through multiple episodes in his life story, each tied to some major event in modern Lebanese history. He missed a huge chunk of the Civil War because he was kidnapped, but not by enemies: it was by a friend of sorts from school who hides Raja away after he witnesses a murder. He’s saving Raja’s life, but he also insists that Raja teach him to dance so he can sleep with some girl in their class – clearly assuming Raja can dance because he’s gay. That’s just the setup; the story goes off the rails from there, or perhaps the rails were blown up by the Israeli invaders. Who can say.

Raja is truly a delight as a narrator and a main character, and his relationship with his mother, who loves to respond to him in paradoxical fashion with “Fuck your mother,” is both an important throughline and a consistent source of laughs. The novel’s nested-stories structure allows Alameddine to jump around through time, while Raja and his mother are there in every one of those stories – true or not, as some of these tales are hard to believe, notably the one of the kidnapping, where Raja and his kidnapper become lovers in a sort of kicked-up gay Stockholm syndrome. Each of the stories, including the resolution of the speaking invitation, which itself is hard for Raja to believe because he’s not an author – he wrote one book, 25 years earlier, that wasn’t successful in the United States, so why on earth would someone there want him to come speak? The answer to that, as with so much else in the book, is hilarious on its surface, but comes with layers of meaning that point to Lebanon’s inability to reckon with or learn from its own history, which keeps looping back on itself, from crisis to crisis, with the Lebanese people always the ones to suffer – including Raja, who takes each setback in a fatalist’s stride.

There are probably further layers of the book that I missed because I’m not that familiar with Lebanon’s history; what I do know is largely through an American lens, such as the news coverage of the hostage crisis, which obviously didn’t paint Lebanon in a kind or accurate light. Alameddine depicts an entirely different Beirut, that of a worldly city with many modern aspects, beset by corruption and conflict, but one where a gay philosophy teacher and his overbearing mother can live their ridiculous life, with a too-large coffee table and a parade of terrible relatives, in something resembling happiness. It’s a richly textured work that takes great tragedies and packages them in wry humor, all delivered by one of the most delightful narrators I’ve encountered in ages.

Next up: I’m way behind on writing up books I’ve read, but right now I’m reading Andrei Bely’s Petersburg.

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